Protests quickly erupted after police gunned down a black man in North Carolina. North Carolina police was black lashed after the death of a colored man shot by one officer in the streets. David Brooks Jr. Is a 45 five year old North Carolina man who was walking by a Dollar General store in Rox Parrot on a Friday morning when he received a shot from a police officer that shot him dead.
Almost immediately after the police involved shootings, rumors spread like wildfire on every social media, with everyone accusing police officers of racism and race targeted violence.
Shortly after the online backlash, protests erupted everywhere, with people demanding justice for David Brooks, another victim of racist crimes. An article from the Blaze featured a sincedeleted tweet that said that Brooks was simply walking home from the Dollar General in a small town called Roxborough when they the police shot him. Another tweet also said that Brooks was slain in the streets of Roxborough by the Roxborough Police Department and shot in the back multiple times until he dropped dead from the lethal shots.
The police, however, had quite a different story to tell. According to them, the officers encountered Brooks when they responded to a report of a man walking down the street with what looked like a shotgun within six minutes from the police getting there, Brooks dropped dead after being shot by officers who recovered a loaded sawed off shotgun at the scene.
Brooks family, however, refused to believe that their son could have done anything wrong. Since there were no police officers injured during the altercation and none of the responding officers had body cameras on them. It was hard to prove for the Brooks family their side of the story, which only made the family all the more insistent on getting justice for David Tan. Elia Partridge, a cousin of David, was the most outraged by the incident, and she had left a strong message for the police Department. You shot my cousin in the street like a dog.
We want justice, she said through tears. We are not going to stop until we get justice for David Brooks because he never hurt anybody. Partridge wasn’t the only one raging about the actions of the police that took David’s life away. John Tucker, of three, who is another cousin of David, disputed law enforcement’s account of the incident in a statement he issued to WRL. Even though John admitted that David was known to carry a gun on him in most of his walks, he said that his cousin would have never used it in a violent way.
He walked the road every day. He doesn’t bother anybody. He doesn’t start no trouble or nothing, Tucker explained. He probably had one of those guns he had on his chest. It was visible.
He wouldn’t hurt anybody, though, he said. I just don’t believe that he would do anything for them to take it this far, Tucker added. He ain’t going to fight against authority. He already knows he can’t win, so why would he do that? As accusations of racism kept leveling up most of the time solely based on rumors, it wasn’t long before protests erupted and escalated quickly to become violent as protesters with Molotov cocktails and incendiary devices were arrested, CBS 17 reported.
We want justice, we want honesty, said via Monique, a protest organizer. We understand that the people that are in office that are in the police Department are in cahoots, so we might have to take this over their heads if possible. Members of the black Panthers marched to the spot where Brooks was killed by police as his family demanded the officer who shot David to be fired.
His brother told a WNCN reporter that David had even been a cadet in the black Panthers. In order to answer back to the rage of the streets and tone down some of the criticism, the police decided to release the dashcam video of the incident which paints quite a different picture from the one presented by Brooks family.
According to the police, David Brooks Jr. Was only shot once through the chest after he pointed the sawed off shotgun at the officers. The police officers present at the scene immediately asked for aid. The dashcam video which protesters demanded relentlessly only corroborates their account in the recorded footage. Police first attempted to talk to David to lower his weapon but David appeared to raise his gun and point it at them, loaded and ready to shoot.
Only then did the officer fire one shot that can be seen striking Brooks before he fell to the ground and officers rushed to his side to give him first aid. Unfortunately, stories become less interesting and receive much less attention when all the facts are released in incidents like this than when everything is based on rumors and manipulating the masses, emotions and most of the time this only leads to an an anti police mentality among members of the public.